STEPHANIE, the first album by the one-man-band Stephanie, is the sometimes bouncy, often dark soundtrack to a bloody revenge film that never was.
STEPHANIE, the first album by the one-man-band Stephanie, is the sometimes bouncy, often dark soundtrack to a bloody revenge film that never was.
“The girl on the cover holding a knife is supposed to be wearing part of a Catholic school uniform and it’s supposed to be her taking revenge on some people that bullied one of her friends until bad stuff happened,” said Ken Hicks, creator of Stephanie. “The story line helped me write [the album], but I want people to interpret it in their own way and make up their own story.”
Hicks grew up in a suburb of DC, where he attended a private Catholic high school because his mother worked there as a biology teacher. He came to Richmond to study film and though he eventually dropped out, his inclination for storytelling can be observed in his inspiration for the album and in the album’s intriguing song titles which include “brooke shields on acid” and “hologram worship.”
In 2011 Hicks began working on STEPHANIE while he was a member of an electronic disco group called “short skirts” with Soroaya Teschner. “short skirts” enjoyed some moderate local fame as a disco/noise group, but was recently disbanded when Teschner left town to attend fashion school.
“I was by myself and I realized it was turning more into Italian disco and the name didn’t fit anymore,” said Hicks.
Wanting to preserve the feminine aspect of the “short skirts” name, Hicks was searching for a new title that both spoke to him personally and exuded the power of the effeminate. He chose the name Stephanie in honor of a long time friend and star of another movie that exists only inside his imagination, this time that of a tortured love story.
“We were childhood-kind-of-like crushes that weren’t allowed to hang out with each other because my best friend was her brother. ” Hicks said. “It’s kind of like I made a fake film in my head of unrequited love in the 80’s.”
Using a 1971 polyphonic synthesizer and a drum machine from the 90’s, Hicks produces deceptively simplistic dance beats that are reminiscent of the 80’s Italian disco movement. Though repetitive, his sound is inventive and his songs build with a fun, nostalgic and somehow alien energy that moves crowds of people to hit the dance floor and strut their stuff.
“To make some of the songs dancey, there’s milliseconds of timing that will change a song from being a head-bobber to people jumping up and down,” said Hicks.
Every detail, beat and second of the STEPHANIE album has been painstakingly recorded and analyzed by Hicks in his bedroom, without the benefit of audio editing software.
“There’s nothing remixed, there’s nothing tuned differently,” said Hicks, who recorded each track on the record live, sometimes to his roommate’s dismay. “Especially using analog equipment. You don’t want to use any filters that are digital because it’ll take away from the music.”
The drum machine Hicks uses has very limited memory space, so he had to learn to apply minimalistic music theory to his work in order to compete with more technically advantaged artists.
“It was out of necessity, but then I realized that if I wanted to be able to stand up to people using really expensive computers that I don’t own, I’ll have to make sure the sounds, the baselines and the weaves sound better than a lot of the stuff they can sample on their computer,” Hicks said.
Though STEPHANIE was inspired by an entirely different storyline, Hicks will be using it in the soundtrack for the movie he is aiming to produce called “Dungeons and Drag Queens”. It’s an 80s style after-school-teen-special/horror movie about three teenagers who postpone their Dungeons and Dragons game to drive the girls next door to a punk show, only to find they must now kill two demons, while drunk and on psychedelic drugs.
“I had the concept in my head that if I wrote this script and if I made an album first that people can hear and….[I would] have a better chance of getting this movie made,” Hicks said.
Hicks is launching a kickstarter campaign to raise money for the production of Dungeons and Drag Queens the movie later this summer, and plans to shoot the first teaser later this month.
